When I was married to Randy*, I was in a constant state of confusion and loneliness. I’d ask what he felt, what he needed, what was going on between us. He’d shrug, tilt his head and say, “I don’t know.” He meant it. He really didn’t know.
It took me a long time to understand what I was seeing. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, what I was up against wasn’t just emotional distance. It was the aftermath of emotional evisceration. The kind of harm that severs a person from their own inner world so thoroughly that connection to self or others feels impossible.
Randy’s mother did a number on him. She used emotional cutoffs, the silent treatment, underhanded jabs that left bruises no one could see, and commands that made sure no one dared ask questions. She didn’t respond to emotions. She punished them. That was her way of staying in control. It was also the way she raised her children to live in exile from their own needs.
Her own sister once told me their father had been a cold man. She said the only time she ever felt safe with him was when she had polio and he held her for once. That was the first and only time. She also clearly indicated that he had been a child molester.
That kind of silence and disconnection–especially around feelings and needs–is classic in families where something is deeply wrong, where there’s something to hide. In sick families, especially those shaped by the secret of child sexual abuse, the unspoken rule is: don’t feel, don’t talk, don’t trust. Emotions become dangerous because they lead to truth. So everyone learns to shut down, stay quiet, and pretend.
Looking back, I see that Randy’s mother and other family members learned early that silence and shutdown were safer than being real.
That legacy was passed down to Randy. He couldn’t talk about the relationship with his father. He wouldn’t go near the one with his mother. I had to put the pieces together myself. Like the time she told me, when my toddler was exhausted and crying, “Just let her walk and cry. It won’t hurt her.” That one sentence told me a great deal about how she parented. Disengagement as discipline. Withdrawal as power. Abandonment disguised as “toughness.” It explained my husband’s behavior.
And that’s what I lived with for over two decades. Not just a man who wouldn’t connect, but a man who had been punished so consistently for having emotions that his system made sure he never got near them. He learned to stay numb, check out, shrug.
But I wasn’t his mother. I was his wife. And I needed someone who could show up in the space between us. Someone who could feel with me. Instead, I was met with absence.
This is what Interpersonal Neurobiology helps us understand: human beings need safe connection, not as a luxury, but a biological imperative. And when we don’t get it, especially from the people meant to protect and attune to us, we adapt. We do what we have to in order to survive. And we carry those adaptations forward, into our partnerships, our parenting, our communities.
So when I say Randy shrugged, I don’t just mean he didn’t answer. I mean he had nothing to answer with. He had never been given the tools to know himself. And that doesn’t excuse what happened between us, but it does explain it. That legacy didn’t start with him. But it ended with me. Because I could name it. I could feel it. I could refuse to keep living in it, and remove our children from that environment.
